The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (43 page)

I got up from the table and opened the door to his room. It had a strange emptiness. Not as if the occupant had just stepped out and was expected back, but as if it had never been occupied and expected nothing. There was a deadness in the air. I turned on the overhead light, went to the windows and pulled up the shades. The gray spring light dared only to enter a yard or so. I decided to change his linen, clean up and put fresh flowers in his room. Meanwhile I would think over my problem.

I stripped the blankets and folded them, then I tugged at the linen. For a moment I was so amazed I forgot my whereabouts. This couldn’t be Bailey’s bed. He was the model of cleanliness, neatness, decorum. Every member of my family had said at one time or other, “Maya should have been a boy and Bailey a girl. She’s so sloppy and he’s so neat”—and more to that effect.

The sheets were gray and black with dirt. An odor of perfumed hair oil and must lifted heavily. I tugged at the edges and let the sheets slide to the floor. The pillows rode along on the end of the sheet. As they tumbled, a small round bundle wrapped in brown paper bounced down at my feet.

I opened it without needing to. Thin brown cigarettes were held together with three rubber bands.

Even in his absence, Bailey had helped me. I lighted one of the cigarettes and in minutes was snickering over the stupidity of the Establishment. The U.S. Army with its corps of spies had been fooled by a half-educated black girl. I sat down on Bailey’s bed and laughed until I had to fight for my breath.

I took a job as swing-shift waitress in a day-and-night restaurant called the Chicken Shack. The record player blared the latest hits incessantly and the late-night clientele spent their overflow energy loudly in the brightly lighted booths.

Smoking grass eased the strain for me. I made a connection at a restaurant nearby. People called it Mary Jane, hash, grass, gauge, weed, pot, and I had absolutely no fear of using it. In the black ghetto of the forties, marijuana, cocaine, hop (opium) and heroin were only a little harder to obtain than rationed whiskey. Although my mother didn’t use anything but Scotch (Black & White), she often sang a song popular in the thirties that at its worst didn’t condemn grass, and at its best extolled its virtues.

I learned new postures and developed new dreams. From a natural stiffness I melted into a grinning tolerance. Walking on the streets became high adventure, eating my mother’s huge dinners an opulent entertainment, and playing with my son was side-cracking hilarity. For the first time, life amused me.

Positive dreaming was introduced on long, slow drags of the narcotic. I was going to do all right in the world, going to have it made—and no doubt through the good offices of a handsome man who would love me to distraction.

My charming prince was going to appear out of the blue and offer me a cornucopia of goodies. I would only have to smile to have them brought to my feet.

R. L. Poole was to prove my dreams at least partially prophetic. When I opened the door to his ring and informed him that I was Rita Johnson, his already long face depressed another inch.

“The … uh … dancer?” His voice was slow and cloudy.

Dancer? Of course. I had been a cook, waitress, madam, bus girl—why not a dancer? After all, it was the only thing I had studied.

“Yes, I’m a dancer.” I looked at him boldly. “Why?”

“I’m looking for a dancer, to work with me.”

I thought he might be a talent scout for a chorus line or maybe the big stage show, featuring colored dancers, called “Change Your Luck.”

“Come in.”

We sat at the dining-room table and I offered a coffee. He looked me over, one feature at a time. My legs (long), my hips (spare), my breasts (nearly nonexistent). He drank the coffee slowly.

“I’ve studied since I was fourteen,” I said.

If the U.S. Army was going to penalize me for having gone to the California Labor School, it was just possible that someone else would find the time spent there valuable. I was right. His eyes moved from an examination of my body back to my face.

“I’m Poole. From Chicago.” His announcement held no boast, and I was sure that represented sophistication rather than false modesty. “I do rhythm tap and I want a girl partner. She doesn’t have to do much
but flash. Are you agva?” (“Flash” and “A.G.V.A.” were words unknown to me.)

I sat quietly and looked at him. Let him figure it out for himself.

“I met the woman at the record shop and she told me about you. Said all you talked about was dancing. She gave me your address.

“Some cats from the Local, musicians, straightened me out with the contracts for a few gigs. Scale is twenty-two fifty, but I’ll do a few under scale to get some ends together.”

I hadn’t the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Scale. Agva. Gigs. Local. Ends.

“More coffee?” I went into the kitchen, walking like a model, chin down and sternum up, and my tail bone tucked under like white women.

I put on a fresh pot of coffee and tried desperately to decide on a role for myself. Should I be mysterious and sultry, asking nothing, answering all questions with a knowing smirk, or should I be the open, friendly, palsy every-boy’s-sister girl-next-door type? No decision came to my mind, so I went back into the dining room, my legs stuck together with fine decorum.

“What did you study?”

“Ballet. Modern Ballet and the Theory of Dance.” I made it sound like Advanced Thermonuclear Propulsion.

His face fell again.

“Any tap-dancing?”

“No.”

“Jazz?”

“No.”

“Acrobatics?”

“No.” I was losing him, so I jumped in the gap. “I used to win every jitterbug contest. I can do the Texas Hop. The Off Time. The boogie-woogie. The Camel Walk. The new Coup de Grâce. And I can do the split.”

With that I stood up, straddle-legged, and looked down into his sad face, then I began to slide down to the floor.

I was unprepared for the movement (I had on a straight skirt), but
R.L. was less ready than I. As my legs slipped apart and down, I lifted my arms in the graceful ballet position number 1 and watched the impresario’s face race from mild interest to incredulous. My hem caught mid-thigh and I felt my equilibrium teeter. With a quick slight of hand I jerked up my skirt and continued my downward glide. I hummed a little snatch of song during the last part of the slither, and kept my mind on Sonja Henie in her cute little tutus.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t practiced the split in months, so my pelvic bones resisted with force. I was only two inches from the floor, and I gave a couple of little bounces. I accomplished more than I planned. My skirt seams gave before my bones surrendered. Then my left foot got caught between the legs of Mother’s heavy oak table, and the other foot jumped at the gas heater and captured the pipe that ran from the jets into the wall. Pinned down at my extremities with the tendons in my legs screaming for ease, I felt as if I were being crucified to the floor, but in true “show must go on” fashion I kept my back straight and my arms uplifted in a position that would have made Pavlova proud. Then I looked at R.L. to see what impression I was making. Pity at my predicament was drawing him up from his chair, and solicitude was written over his face with a brush wider than a kitchen mop.

My independence and privacy would not allow me to accept help. I lowered my arms and balanced my hands on the floor and jerked my right foot. It held on to the pipe, so I jerked again. I must have been in excellent shape. The pipe came away from the stove, and gas hissed out steadily like ten fat men resting on a summer’s day.

R.L. stepped over me and looked down into the gas jet. “Goddam.” He swiveled over to the window and opened it as wide as it would go, then back down to the stove. Near the wall at the end of the pipe, he found a tap and turned it. The hissing died and the thick sweetish odor diluted.

I had still to extricate my other leg from the avaricious table.

R.L. lifted an edge of the table, and my ankle was miraculously free. I could have gotten up, but my feelings were so hurt by the stupid clumsiness that I just rolled over on my stomach, beat my hands on the floor and cried like a baby.

There was no doubt that R.L. Poole had just witnessed his strangest audition. He could have walked down the hall and out the door, leaving me breathing in the dust of the ancient rug, but he didn’t. I heard the chair creak, announcing that he had sat back down.

I was sure he was doing his best to hold in his laughter. I tried for more tears, to irritate him and force him to leave, but the tear ducts had closed and the sound I made was as false as a show girl’s eyelashes. Nothing for it but to get up.

I dried my face with dusty hands and lifted my head. R.L. was sitting at the table in the same chair, his head propped up with his hand. The dark-brown face was somber and he said quietly, “Well, anyway, you’ve got nice legs.”

When we went to a nearby rehearsal hall I was amazed to see R.L. Poole move. The wind seemed to make him dance. I pictured his lean bony legs as being attached directly to his sharp shoulders with skeletal pins. For he would hunch his shoulders and glide across the rehearsal-hall floor, his heels and toes tapping below him in a fusillade of small explosions, his arms dangling at his side, his face a pockmarked oval.

He tried to simplify the intricate tap rhythms by singing them to me in a rough, low voice. “Boom, boom, boo rah, boo rah, boo rah, boo rah, brah, brah.” Sharp slaps on the floor, dust rising from the old wood.

With the polish of a professional, R.L. made it all appear easy. I telescoped my energy on the gliding steps of the flash, with no less purpose than a ballet student mastering a tour jeté. I would raise my arms shoulder-high, then open them out slowly, take two sliding steps, bend one knee and hold the position. An accomplished flash partner frames and highlights the principal dancer when he is tapping out complex rhythms. To be able to let my body swing free over the floor and the crushing failures in my past was freedom. I thanked R.L. for my liberation and fell promptly in love with him.

I committed myself to a show-business career, and dancing and studying dance swallowed me. Charlie Parker’s “Cool Breeze” was my practice piece. Flash, slide through the opening riff, then stash during Bird’s solo; keeping soft-shoe time by dusting the boards with the soles of my feet, then break during Bud Powell’s piano wizardry. Break, cross step. Chicago. Fall. Fall. Break, crossover. Apple. Break. Time step. Slap crossover. Then break and Fall off the Log, going out on the closing riff.

I practiced until my ankles ached, without complaint, and was more than rewarded when R.L. told me one day, “After we break in our act out here, I think we’ll go East. Big Time. Join Duke’s or Basie’s road show.”

My concern was not how I’d manage with my son on the Big-time Circuit, but how I could perfect my flash so that R.L. wouldn’t go looking for a prettier partner. I used my time at the Chicken Shack to strengthen my ankles. When I was behind the counter I stood on tiptoe, letting one heel down, then raising it, and pressing the other to the floor.

When R.L. decided we were ready to try out our act, I sprang my homemade costume on him. I had gone to a theatrical store and bought a wig, coke feathers, a padded bra and a G-string. I sewed the shiny black feathers on the scanty outfit, then added a few sequins and a little sparkle for show. My costume could be held in one balled fist, and the G-string barely covered my pubic hair and the cleavage of my buttocks.

“Er … no.” He lowered his head and searched painfully for the words he wanted. “Uh … Rita … no. That won’t … uh … get it … That’s … wh … a shake dancer’s rig … I mean, I’ll show you … Something like a bathing suit … with spangles …”

I stood before him, my oiled skin gleaming, the fluffy wig trembling
with ringlets on my head, withering with disappointment. My costume was a faithful copy of L’Tanya’s, the popular interpretive dancer who was a current favorite at the Champagne Supper Club.

“You’ll look … I mean, tap shoes are gonna look … I mean, they don’t go together …”

I remembered. L’Tanya danced barefoot, with a string of little bells around her ankles and rings on her toes. I reluctantly agreed that my creation didn’t fit a rhythm tap routine but put it away for future use.

R.L. rented a red, white and blue costume for me that was cut like a one-piece bathing suit. I added a top hat and cane, and we were ready for our first gig in a small night club down the peninsula. Ah, the smell of grease paint!

Our routine was honed to a fine point, our flashes and stashes and hand movements coordinated in machinelike precision. My costume fit passably well, my hair was done beautifully, and I had on enough make-up to stave off a winter cold.

The orchestra struck up our music and I led “Poole and Rita” out on the dance floor.

Dum dum te dum dum dum.

“And now, breaking in their new act, from way out Chicago way—Poole and Rita!”

I was miraculously in the center of an empty floor, with lights blazing down and I felt nearly naked. Just out of the glare I saw what appeared like a thousand knees and legs around small tables. I couldn’t make out faces in the gloom, but I was sure they were there and probably all staring at me.

R.L. glided onto the floor, tap-tap-tapping away, flashed by me and I wanted to grab his hand. He pulled away to anywhere, but I was frozen in the spotlight.